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A WINTER TALE
Ilene Alvis
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haven't written an article for the bulletin for a couple years.
I no longer have the seventy tanks I had and which I sometimes
miss. What I don't miss is the three water changes a week, the
endless filling of hungry little mouths, or the feeling my
fingers were never going to be unwrinkled. What I miss is the
beauty of the fish. The feeling of contentment when I looked
around the hatchery and saw nothing but healthy, growing,
beautiful fish. Or the excitement when a new spawn of betta's
were beginning to color and seeing something new and
interesting. |
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I have a bedroom where I once had a hatchery.
This is good as my daughter came home and she would have had to
develop gills to sleep there otherwise. However, no hatchery is
a mixed bag. Glad my daughter's home. Happy to have no
responsibilities so I can spend weeks gone in the motorhome.
Relieved not to worry about velvet, power outages, ich, poor
sales, fin rot, buying shrimp eggs, hydras, and endless endless
water changes. But, I still miss the beauty of the fish. |
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Okay, so much for laments. This article is about
an aquatic critter not a fish. At least, it starts being an
aquatic critter and becomes terrestrial. At least partly
terrestrial. Have I piqued your curiosity? Here goes : |
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have several water gardens in my yard. You know those half
barrels the stores all sell in the spring? We used several of
those, lining them inside with black plastic then adding clay,
potting soil and a thick coating of pea gravel to keep it from
floating. In these we planted a variety of marsh plants like
iris, miniature cattails, water poppies, etc. In the spring I
usually drop a couple goldfish or a hand full of White clouds in
the gardens to keep down the mosquitos. As the years went by we
also attracted a small but loyal cadre of wild tree frogs. Their
insistent calls early in the year tell me it's time to plant the
peas, and start pulling weeds: it's springtime! They lay eggs in
one of the barrels. Always the same one. I have no idea what
makes it a better choice for their children than the others but
they apparently know something I don't.
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Being
a long time tom-boy and collector of tadpoles, salamanders, and
other things both creepy and not, they provide me with treasured
memories of my childhood. I quietly monitor their development,
and always put the white clouds in that particular barrel as the
goldfish will eat the tadpoles. (Either that or eat so much of
the algae that the tadpoles starve. All I know for sure is if
there is goldfish in that barrel, there are never any tadpoles.)
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 Anyway,
making a short story long, come last fall, just before the first
freeze, I noticed there were still a half dozen
unmetamorphosized tadpoles left in the barrel. (Not too sure if
that's a word. The computer says it isn't but I'm going to use
it anyway. You get the idea.) Well, I just couldn't let the
little critters freeze to death, and I did have a handy
container full of water. So, I brought them in for the winter.
There was lots of algae in the container, a gallon sized battery
jar with soil, gravel and some sort of unnamed aquatic plant
that I had to winter inside, so it seemed the perfect solution.
Turned out to be too much of a perfect solution and the little
tadpoles began growing like crazy. Shortly a couple of them
began sporting hind legs. Then the buds of front legs. Well,
from my childhood experiences, I knew that as soon as the front
legs popped out, they left the water, tail and all. And they
were perfectly capable of climbing glass. Obviously the battery
jar wasn't going to work for long.
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 Fortunately I still had several two gallon tanks,
with glass lids. I cleaned one up, put in gravel and banked it
so half the tank was gravel and half was water, put a couple
Anubis Nanna in the water and a weed of some sort in the gravel,
(it looked nicer that way) and added the tadpoles. In days I had
a tadpole, now frog, climbing on the glass. With the second
problem solved, I now had a third; feeding the little, itty,
bitty frog.
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I use to have wingless fruit flies, when I had
baby fish to feed, now however, the only fruit flies were fully
winged in my compost pit and as soon as it froze hard, they'd be
gone too. Chris, the owner of Phase II Pets in Port Orchard,
came to my rescue. She let me dig through her cricket box and
have as many itty bitty crickets I could find. She also happened
to have an orange someone had left unattended and was crawling
with fruit fly larvae. Between the two, the itty bitty frog got
food.
It probably took two months for all the tadpoles
to become frogs. And by then, the first and largest of the frogs
was large enough to eat the smallest of them. So, despite
Chris's continuing generosity and the sacrifice of uncounted
crickets, the six tadpoles eventually became three full grown
frogs.
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I
had told several people what I was doing, and most of them told
me it was impossible to raise our local tadpoles to frogs. But,
with a wealth of childhood experience, and lots of crickets, in
a few weeks, when the frogs outside emerge from their winter
sleep and make their presence known, I'll have three more to add
to their number. It's been in interesting if unplanned winter
project. Happy
fishing.
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